Considering Making Flying a Career
 

I'm a sophomore in college. I've been obsessed with aviation my entire life. I'm currently finishing up my PPL.

For the first time, I'm seriously considering making flying a career as opposed to just a hobby. I would do so via the civilian route.

Some thoughts:

I was looking at this website and conveyed the supposed hiring minimums at the regionals to my instructor. He then informed me that he had 1,200 hours and that he is not even to the point where he would have a realistic chance of being hired by a regional. Is this correct?

What troubles me is that I know of and have seen pilots who are very old, who seemingly have not yet reached the pentacle to which all of us seem to strive throughout our careers: the mainline carriers. How many pilots get stuck in that void and have to fly for mere pennies for decades?

I will likely complete my PPL before the end of this semester. In January, i'll be going on a National Guard deployment for 9 or 12 months. When I return, I am considering taking a semester off of school and focusing on building time and earning certifications and ratings. Would you consider it wise for me to take that time off of school and potentially attend a course such as ATP's "Airline Career Pilot Program"? Could the $50,000 or so that it would cost to get me 270 TT, 115 multi, and a CFI ever be realistically recouped? In order to get to that point, would it be cheaper for me to purchase a Tri-Pacer for $15,000 or so and fly the hours on my own?

...there is a captain at my work(as of last month) who is up to $105k. maybe the captains you are referring to made a choice to stay there(regional flying) for better quality of life and pay!


stay in school! it's easier said than done, but can't you do both?

Do the math. Say AA, Delta, United, US Air and SW all have 10,000 pilots. About half of them are Captains. So there are about 25,000 mainline Captains. We'll say to keep the math simple that they made Captain at age 40 and that they are equally distributed in age. That means that about 1000 Captain slots open up every year. If you're number 1001 you have to wait till next year but that just delays someone next year. Even if you say they made Captain at 52, that only leaves 2000 upgrades a year.

You can say the math is off, I don't really know the numbers at all the majors but you get the idea. Just because you want the job doesn't mean you'll get it. Atlas, we'll say a second tier cargo hauler that has been hiring for the last year, has hired about 4% of the qualified pilots that sent in resumes. The other 96% were qualified but there is no need for them so they didn't get the job.


American will have pilots retire out of the right seat because there hasn't been any movement (forward) there in 10 years.

Taking time off from college for this is crazy.

Go to college!

Do yourself a huge favor: finish college. Put some work in at flying when you can, and when you graduate you can really attack it (if you're still interested). Do a lot more research around this site. The page you were referencing with the hiring minimums is from 2007 in the middle of a huge hiring boom (which later fell victim to a tanking economy and begat a boom in furloughs). You can't predict the hiring trends out much more than a year in this industry... you can't really predict ANYTHING out more that a year in this industry, if even that.